Lilo, we have no sunflowers just now in the Pacific NW, but we have the power of the ocean and the guardianship of the snow-capped mountains. The healing thoughts of every woman who ever faced this are with your sister now. I'm lighting a candle now. Sheila

I grow a few acres of a variety of sunflowers every year and have never heard of any that take 120 days. Even the Mammoth only take a few months, most take less than that. I'm in 7a, near Washington DC so my season is a tiny bit longer but I direct sow my sunflowers starting in early May and continue every two weeks through the beginning of Sept. I usually have flowers through mid-Nov. The foliage can look kind of ratty when it gets cool out but the blooms are fine. I've never started sunflowers inside, nor have I ever transplanted them. I have grown Teddy Bear, Joker and a few others in containers but think that the vast majority do better inground. Karyn

Brian At one time I was a professional sunflower breeder. I was working on the perennial Helianthus species, but breeding methods are much the same. Just cross a red one with a giant one. Grow out lots of seeds. They should have yellow flowers. Save seeds again, and grow them out. Some should be red, and bigger than what you started with. If my memory is wrong, and the red does show up in the first generation, then it will be easier. Just cross red-flowered sunfloewrs back to the large-flowered variety every time you get the red. Do not use a commercial F1 hybrid sunflower for crossing, at least not as the seed parent. Those commercial hybrids are made using a male-sterile strain as the female parent of the hybrid. Those genes may mess you up later. So cross the red hybrids with the large headed variety again. Again you will have yellow so grow out another generation from them. Some should be red again. As soon as you get some red sunflowers that are pretty big, you can stop backcrossing, which is what this system is called, and start selecting in the population for bigger flowered reds. With 2 years per backcross, it will take a while, but much of the size change will be early, as some of the size is due to the sunflower putting all its energy into one flower head instead of many smaller flower heads. And that is due mostly to one gene. You can choose to stop backcrossing to the big variety when you want to. It is important to grow seeds from more than one plant in each generation. Many sunflowers are self-incompatible. That means each plant needs pollen from a different plant to set seeds. As few as 6 plants per generation is risky, because closely related plants may not be recognised as different plants. If you only have one red hybrid in a generation in which you had planned to backcross to the large variety, no problem. Mix the pollen from several large flowered plants and use it on the one red one, and use the one red flower's pollen on several large flowered plants. Sunflower's pollen will keep for a few weeks, if kept dry. Water kills it on contact. Sunflowers have never been successfully crossed with anything except other sunflowers. Crosses between some species of sunflowers are really dificult. Some have never been successful. And yes, they have been tried in all combinations. Dr. Heiser, for one, made crosses in all possible combinations to see which would cross and which wouldn't. The annual domestic species will cross easily with some wild annual species. It will cross with some difficulty with some perennial species, Jerusalem artichoke being one. Good luck and have fun. Walter

Bon, It just depends on the type of sunflower. With the gigantic monsters that get 8 to 12' tall or taller, I like using green metal t-posts. I have some that are 6' tall and some that are 8'. I am not tall, so I have to stand on a ladder to hammer the t-posts into the ground, but once they are in place, I leave them there for the season. Much depends on how exposed your garden area is. Someone who has a good windbreak around their property might not stake the really tall sunflowers at all, but someone in an area with a lot of wind exposure and no windbreaks around might need to stake the tall ones. Since we raised the garden fence to 8' in height a few years ago, I just tie my sunflower stalks to the fence more often than not. If I do things right, the fence is covered in vining plants like moonflower vine, morning glories, black-eyed susan vines (as cute and as cheery as sunflowers), hyacinth bean vines, cypress vines, cardinal climber, half-runner beans, pole beans, mini pumpkins, cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, winter squash and gourds. Somewhere in the midst of all those vining plants, there will be some tall zinnias and some sunflowers that the vines climb and help attach to the fence. It is a sort of crazy, madcap garden madness and likely wouldn't appeal to someone who wants a neat, tidy garden, but my garden is a full-blown jungle every year, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If you grow some of the more recently developed ornamental sunflowers that top out at only 5' or 6' in height, you likely won't even have to stake them. It is only the ones that go above 6' in height that seem to start leaning over and leaning and leaning once they are tall and heavy. You also can avoid staking if you plant them thick enough that they hold each other up....you don't see any staked sunflowers in the fields of sunflowers grown by sunflower farmers! If you feel like your area is exposed enough that even 6' tall sunflowers would need to be staked, I imagine even 3 to 4' tall grade stakes would work. I use that size stakes for lots of garden tasks because a bundle of grade stakes is relatively inexpensive compared to metal fence posts. I also use 3' tall green metal t-posts in the garden a lot. Often a tomato cage that is supporting a tall indeterminate plant will stay upright just fine as long as the cage is staked with a couple of 3' tall t-posts. Some of the larger tomato varieties that carries huge loads of fruit do need a 6' or 8' tall post most years, but a lot of the more average-sized ones do fine with smaller posts. I haven't grown as many sunflowers in recent years because of ongoing drought that just won't end. Last year I planted tons of heat- and drought-tolerant flowers in the new back garden, which has a highly sandy loam content than the front clayey garden, so this year I am going to plant a lot of sunflowers back there. And if, in fact, we never make it out of drought conditions here and are headed into spring planting season already in drought, I likely will plant all the veggies in the front garden and only put flowers in the back garden. It is easier for me to stop watering flowers in severe drought than to stop watering veggies. (It isn't easy for me to ever just give up on the garden and stop watering anything, but the recent summer conditions have made it easier because you cannot even water enough to help.) Sunflowers are about the happiest-looking flowers around, and wherever the native sunflowers spring up, I just leave them there. It doesn't matter if they are in the dog yard and we have to mow around them, or if they are in the path between the greenhouse and potting shed....I leave them and walk around them. Eventually a hungry deer will eat them, thereby removing them for me, but the birds, bees, butterflies and I will enjoy them every summer until the deer take them out. Once you have even a single native sunflower that has gone to seed, you'll have them forever because the birds spread their seed around the natural way. I planted seeds of Maximilian sunflowers in out of the way places that we don't mow, like on the edge of the woodland, because they are very drought-tolerant and are one of the few plants that can be in full bloom and looking beautiful in the worst of the late summer heat and drought conditions. In the worst drought years they are much shorter than normal and have fewer flowers, but they still are there and they still have some flowers. We used to have about a half-acre full of black-eyed susans along our southern fence line that bloomed a large portion of the summer, but the persistent summer droughts since 2011 have wiped them out. I might try mowing that pasture low in late winter and sowing black-eyed susan seeds there in an effort to reestablish those flowers there. It looked really sad and bare the last couple of summers with nothing but prairie grasses. Black-eyed susans and clasping conflowers used to pop up all over our property back when we had more summer rainfall, but lately they have been scarce. To me, they are as cheerful and happy-looking as sunflowers, but at a shorter height and with smaller flowers obviously. I like to have them mixed in with sunflowers or at least growing close together because they are so pretty together. When the garden fence was shorter, the deer sometimes would jump the fence and eat every part of the sunflower plant except the hard woody part of the stalk. They'd eat entire flowers before they even bloomed, but also while they were in bloom and after they had bloomed and were full of maturing seeds. Staking the plants gave the plants a little protection from the deer because they didn't devour the staked ones as much as the unstaked ones. I imagine it was a pain in the neck to work their way around the garden twine and stakes. You shouldn't have as much of a deer problem there as I have here. The only way to figure out if sunflowers will need to be staked, to some degree, will be by growing them and seeing how they handle the winds. some years, they'll be fine with no staking, but in other years, they (and you) will be happier if they are staked. I really didn't start staking sunflowers until I made my first sunflower house. A sunflower house is, essentially, a children's playhouse made by planting sunflowers in a square (leave an opening for a door) to simulate walls. Then, once the sunflowers are several feet tall, you sow the seed of fast-growing vines between the sunflower plants. As the vining plants (I use morning glories, generally 'Heavenly Blue' the most often, but any vine will work) climb the sunflowers, they put a lot of extra weight on the sunflower stalks, so that's why it is good to stake each sunflower in the sunflower house. Once the sunflower stalks and vines are taller than the tallest person who will be in the house, you run garden twine back and forth between the flower stalks/stakes at head height. Then your vines grow horizontally along the twice to form the room of the sunflower house. It is simply the cutest thing you'll ever have in your garden! I almost planted a sunflower house just for myself last year in the back garden, and I think I might go ahead and do it this year. When we had little kids around, the sunflower houses were so much fun for them to play house in. Girls might drag little plastic chairs and teddy bears and dolls into a sunflower house, but boys will bring water guns, rubber band guns, nerf guns, etc. into the sunflower houses and use them as sunflower forts. Dawn